Starsector > Suggestions
Short review from a new player
Serigarth:
Hi,
This is mostly going to be feedback from a new player, I'm on my third playthrough, second with Nexerelin installed.
Also I apologize since this will be mostly negative elements. Overall the game is great and I can't wait to see the finished version, but the points listed will be frustrations I've encountered while playing the game.
1. "Cheating" AI
I know this is more about the AI being primitive and probably resource limits, but the AI being an old-fashioned "mind-reading" AI (an AI that reads your inputs and immediately reacts to them) can be very frustrating at times. It feels really cheap when in battle you Tab out to give orders to your ships to focus fire on one enemy and the moment you unpause the very same ship starts retreating/pulling back without even having been the target of increased fire.
Same for when you're playing cat and mouse with the patrols and the fleets. A weird thing to mention here is I've had fleets way inferior to mine charge at me directly, and stronger fleets fleeing when I tried to have a go at them.
2. Talking about ships running away...
Does the AI have any tactics other than "run away when targeted" ? It's very tiresome when you spend 10 minutes chasing small ships around because you forgot to bring a carrier to deal with them
3. Ship speed
This one is simple. Retreating ships that are still facing you shouldn't be able to use more than 50% of their speed, they're running on their thrusters and not their engine. Either turn around to get at full speed and expose your back, or keep facing the enemy to do a defensive retreat but run the risk of faster enemy ships catching up to you.
4. Pirates acting like a full-fledged, cohesive faction
Pirates in their current form feel like a hostile recolor of independents. There should either be factions among pirates, or a revision in their behavior. It's not normal pirates can mounts a large scale raid and throw it at me every 30 days, or install a new base across the galaxy with the specific purpose of raiding me the same week I destroy the one that is currently doing so. If they're going to be one cohesive faction, the cooldown between raids should be longer, since a large scale raid being defeated making only a little dent in their forces makes no sense. And that's not counting the fact they technically shouldn't be in a position to mount military-sized punitive expeditions...
In this case what I would do would be to remove the Independent faction and either split and/or convert it in merchant companies, some of whom don't really mind where the credits are from as long as they keep rolling in. Pirates would then become a relatively rare faction operating from abandoned space stations or remote worlds and would only be small factions, without cohesion, while still packing a punch if attacked unprepared, but nothing that could actually survive a military expedition.
I'm aware this would almost gut the Pirates, but in their current iteration they make little sense to a science-fiction fan. A pirate faction that would reach the scale it has in Star Sector would have long established itself as a full-fledged faction with a leader, rules and etc. and would resemble the Persean League or the Independents, or would have sought to join another faction. And it makes no sense for them to have the zeal and the resources to act as they do given their lore as abandoned people scrounging up what they can.
5. Expeditions
These wouldn't be bothersome if they were either justified or made sense.
The Hegemony or Luddic Church getting upset over a free port is understandable, but the response is absurd. They should be demanding perdiodically for you to stop it, and lose 10 rep every time you decline, ending with a declaration of war if you go down to "hostile"
As for the expeditions coming from the factions because of your market share in X or Y, they're laughable at best. They could occur, but they should come with a massive reputation loss toward all other factions for whoever does it, so they would be rare at best, and mostly happen when you're on bad terms with the Diktat or the League.
This would in turn allow to make colonies slower to grow and make the game more balanced.
SPOILERS FROM THIS POINT
Alex:
Hi - thank you for your feedback! Had a look through it, it's always valuable to get some first-time-player impressions. Just a couple of quick responses on a few points:
--- Quote from: Serigarth on September 02, 2019, 07:49:41 PM ---1. "Cheating" AI
I know this is more about the AI being primitive and probably resource limits, but the AI being an old-fashioned "mind-reading" AI (an AI that reads your inputs and immediately reacts to them) can be very frustrating at times. It feels really cheap when in battle you Tab out to give orders to your ships to focus fire on one enemy and the moment you unpause the very same ship starts retreating/pulling back without even having been the target of increased fire.
Same for when you're playing cat and mouse with the patrols and the fleets. A weird thing to mention here is I've had fleets way inferior to mine charge at me directly, and stronger fleets fleeing when I tried to have a go at them.
--- End quote ---
The AI definitely doesn't do this, or anything like it. It's reacting to changing situations, and even has some built-in delays so it doesn't react too robotically to some things. In particular, it has no awareness of whatever orders you might have issued in combat.
--- Quote from: Serigarth on September 02, 2019, 07:49:41 PM ---2. Talking about ships running away...
Does the AI have any tactics other than "run away when targeted" ? It's very tiresome when you spend 10 minutes chasing small ships around because you forgot to bring a carrier to deal with them
--- End quote ---
Yeah, I've got a TODO item to make the last few ships less of a hassle to chase down. There are already some things in place to make it less of an issue, believe it or not! But it does look like it still needs a bit more help.
Serigarth:
6. Remnant Radiant ships
These should have either a significantly longer cooldown on their warp ability, or have an impact on flux. Right now they can spam it 2 to 4 times in a row with no penalties which make little sense.
7. Capital ships don't feel scary
The fact a bunch of fighters and frigates can do severe harm to an Onslaught feels disappointing. For balance's sake I understand why it's like that, but if we were to go with realism then if fighters and frigates can damage an Onslaught, in turn the Thermal Pulse cannons should be able to one-shot anything in their path that's smaller than a cruiser.
Same applies to Paragons and other Capitals. The Conquest and the Odyssey particularly feel even more underwhelming
Edit: the only Capital that actually feels scary is the Remnant one
SUGGESTIONS
Remnant raids
This is one of the things Nexerelin does well, among may others: Remnant raids. They are rare enough to feel natural, and the fleets showing up are strong enough to make you worry.
This is definitely something that should appear in the endgame. Ideally move the Remnant systems farther away from the core, even better in an area surrounded by black holes and difficult to access. The way to trigger Remnant raids would be either to happen when one faction stumbles upon them, or on a time-locked event, which in my opinion should also be linked to the Gates.
As the gates reactivate, AI fleets come pouring out of them, having taken control of a few after their last defeat and figuring out how to get them back up and running. Would in turn also start a time-locked event with Domain ships entering the system via the Gates.
Gates
Talking about the Gates, logically speaking there should be a "Main Gate" somewhere in the galaxy, one that is big enough other ships hauling gates could come through once it was put in place. Could also be tied to another endgame event, reactivating it to reestablish contact with the Domain, or stopping others from doing so.
So far that's all I had on my list of things I wished to give feedback on, I know there's a few other things but they don't come to mind right now.
PS: thanks Alex for the reply already, I wanted to make two separate posts to make sure whoever was new wouldn't have certain things spoiled to them, and saw you replied already, that was quick
Alex:
--- Quote from: Serigarth on September 02, 2019, 08:29:37 PM ---PS: thanks Alex for the reply already, I wanted to make two separate posts to make sure whoever was new wouldn't have certain things spoiled to them, and saw you replied already, that was quick
--- End quote ---
Yep, figured part 2 was coming based on the end of the first post :) Thank you for being careful about spoilers!
SCC:
--- Quote from: Serigarth on September 02, 2019, 07:49:41 PM ---Same for when you're playing cat and mouse with the patrols and the fleets. A weird thing to mention here is I've had fleets way inferior to mine charge at me directly, and stronger fleets fleeing when I tried to have a go at them.
--- End quote ---
I think in the first case, it's an issue with small patrols wanting you to turn your transponder on, which is fairly stupid, since without back up the player will just smash them, if he doesn't care about this faction's patrol. They should just bugger off indeed.
--- Quote from: Serigarth on September 02, 2019, 07:49:41 PM ---3. Ship speed
This one is simple. Retreating ships that are still facing you shouldn't be able to use more than 50% of their speed, they're running on their thrusters and not their engine. Either turn around to get at full speed and expose your back, or keep facing the enemy to do a defensive retreat but run the risk of faster enemy ships catching up to you.
--- End quote ---
I think this would be too tedious to attempt. You need to make AI even more cowardly, in order to avoid useless commitment, and most ships and weapons would have to rebalanced, slower ships would have to get even more bonus range and burst weapons would be much better, simply because you can't cycle in and out to use constant pressure ones. All that to make combat... Maybe less intuitive, but not really any better, in my opinion.
--- Quote from: Serigarth on September 02, 2019, 07:49:41 PM ---5. Expeditions
These wouldn't be bothersome if they were either justified or made sense.
The Hegemony or Luddic Church getting upset over a free port is understandable, but the response is absurd. They should be demanding perdiodically for you to stop it, and lose 10 rep every time you decline, ending with a declaration of war if you go down to "hostile"
As for the expeditions coming from the factions because of your market share in X or Y, they're laughable at best. They could occur, but they should come with a massive reputation loss toward all other factions for whoever does it, so they would be rare at best, and mostly happen when you're on bad terms with the Diktat or the League.
This would in turn allow to make colonies slower to grow and make the game more balanced.
--- End quote ---
This makes sense. You are an upstart and are upsetting the balance of power and if I'm not gaining any power, no one else can. It's unfair, but factions know it and they like it that way, since it's unfair in their favour. Any given faction doesn't care about others sending expeditions to you, since you aren't affiliated with them, thus a potential enemy — why interrupt your enemies taking one another out, then? There's also the fact that if they don't stop you, it will be a silent permission of what you are doing, of people going independent and outside the sphere of influence of major factions and, well, they like being in power, so you are going to make an example. Being an independent power is not allowed in this sector.
In gameplay terms, I suspect that the way they work now is a temporary measure, just like colonies making so much money for nothing does. Free money, free problems. Main issue is that you can switch free port on or off, making LC and Hegemony expeditions easy to avoid, but you can't limit your exports in any reliable way.
As for independents faction? I assume that most, if not all of them, have already signed deals with factions, making them sort of their members, just not enforcing their laws as harshly (so they might trade with you, even if you are a persona non grata). Or factions possibly use those colonies for certain more shadowy purposes... They are alive, because they aren't dangerous and they are useful.
--- Quote from: Serigarth on September 02, 2019, 08:29:37 PM ---6. Remnant Radiant ships
These should have either a significantly longer cooldown on their warp ability, or have an impact on flux. Right now they can spam it 2 to 4 times in a row with no penalties which make little sense.
--- End quote ---
So, you are complaining that a deliberately unfair ship is unfair? It being able to use phase skimmer like Wolf or Medusa is a part of it being a boss faction ship. It's meant to be an ***.
--- Quote from: Serigarth on September 02, 2019, 08:29:37 PM ---7. Capital ships don't feel scary
The fact a bunch of fighters and frigates can do severe harm to an Onslaught feels disappointing. For balance's sake I understand why it's like that, but if we were to go with realism then if fighters and frigates can damage an Onslaught, in turn the Thermal Pulse cannons should be able to one-shot anything in their path that's smaller than a cruiser.
Same applies to Paragons and other Capitals. The Conquest and the Odyssey particularly feel even more underwhelming
Edit: the only Capital that actually feels scary is the Remnant one
--- End quote ---
A bunch of fighters and frigates can take out a *lone* Onslaught, yes. You can take out all capital ships with smaller ships, if those capital ships have no escorts. However, in a battle line, it's dangerous for most ships to get close to them, with your best option being some cruisers or a capital ship of your own, or a massed fighter strike. Another advantage that capital ships have is that they are way more efficient when it comes to officer use, but NPC fleets rarely make good use of them.
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